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Selling your house

I was really hoping we would be one of those stories, like I’ve read so often these days, where our house was sold super quickly and we would be able to move on with our plans right away. It almost was! But no such luck. Here we are, four weeks later and I feel like we are starting over again. Probably because we ARE starting over again.

I’ve truly tried to remain patient these last four weeks. I have even just had a conversation with my 16 year old about how it’s just better to be patient when you really want something. To occupy your attention with something else and the time will just pass. So for me, patience hasn’t really been the problem with selling our house. I’ve had moments of being overwhelmed and ready to just get done with all of this, but I’ve managed to stay fairly patient. So why do I feel like we are starting over? We have just removed the listing from the market, redone the pictures and it’s being re-listed today, after being off the market for a few days. Only, we are re-listing with a new agent.

I never realized how stressful a process it would be to sell our home. From all the updating we did to it, all the money we put into it for updates and repairs, staging and getting it ready for market, listing it and then keeping it in model home condition so that we are can run out of the house at a moment’s notice if an appointment was booked to see the house. All of this is very stressful and I can see that stress taking it’s toll on my family. One thing is for sure, we are going to need a vacation when it finally does sell!

Well add to that, the feeling that Shawn and I were having that we just weren’t on the same page as our realtor. From the beginning it felt that way. Though it was about what the house should be listed for, so I thought that should be expected. I felt like it is probably common that people feel like their home should be worth more, and the realtor is there to show them why their expectations are a little high. I have never felt like my expectations where too high or that the price I felt we should be asking was too high. Our home is in a curious situation in that it’s in a housing market that is just exploding right now. The population is expanding every day. When we bought our house here 15 years ago, we moved to the outskirts of a town of about 10,000. In the last 5 years that number has grown to 60,000 and if you count the outskirts, about 80,000. The neighborhood we live in is now closer in due to things growing out this way. What used to be a 8 minute drive to the store is now a 4 minute drive to the new store. We used to be a small neighborhood of about 50 homes and that has more than doubled due to a custom home builder buying land behind our homes and expanding the neighborhood. All of this has, what we consider, skyrocketed the price of homes, property taxes and cost of living here. So if you’re looking to sell your house and move, then it should be great for you financially. Unfortunately for me, we had two homes in my neighborhood sell at the very same time for under market and extremely fast, despite no other houses doing this. This is causing a huge problem for me in that our realtor felt like we should be doing the same thing. Sell low and get it sold fast. To be fair, as she kept pointing out to us, we aren’t a custom home with high end upgrades, which is what is being built all around us now. But to be fair to me, a house on the same street as those houses, which wasn’t a custom home with all the high end upgrades sold for $80,000 more than those only a few months prior, yet I wasn’t being put into the category with that house…only the two lowest selling ones.

Now I would agree that we were over priced if we had gotten no traffic to the house, but that just wasn’t the case. In the first week we received a contract for the full asking price. For unfortunate reasons, that didn’t work. On the second week we had someone come out to view the house twice then ask our realtor if we were “motivated” because they would want to do some upgrades. Her response was we had only been on the market for 13 days. The third week we received two calls of interest. One of them came back twice and were measuring the rooms. In total we had 15 viewings of the house, not including a few from an open house and a parade of realtors. The common opinion of the majority was it was priced well, clean, staged well and nice. For some it was too far out of town, priced too high for one realtor and one didn’t like our cat roaming free in the house during showings. Overall, it was positive feedback. The traffic was there and the interest was there, but nothing was happening. The last one interested was trying to buy at the top of their price range and had not put in an offer, yet we felt like our realtor was doing everything she could to try and talk us into dropping our price, and not just a little. It just felt to us like this was the wrong selling tactic and didn’t sit right with us. It was obvious to us we just weren’t having a meeting of the minds with her and probably wouldn’t. She was determined to sell our house low and fast and we aren’t. So, it was time to find someone who thought more like we did. Nothing personal, but we are talking about the biggest investment we own.

I was already talking to someone else before we even listed the house. Someone who had been selling homes for a lot longer and this wasn’t their first listing ever. Someone who had actually sold a home in my neighborhood before. That had been doing it for so long that it isn’t just about a paycheck anymore. When I didn’t understand our realtors responses to situations that were coming up, I called him to ask him about it and his thoughts were exactly the same as mine, without me even revealing to him what I thought. He gave me his unsolicited opinion without ever asking for anything in return. Simply because we had a mutual friend who had given me his name for a second opinion. So after calling him a couple of times, it just seemed more logical to us to be working with someone who had the same train of thought as we did, rather than fighting with someone through an already stressful process. So we decided to switch realtors in the middle of the game. This meant nearly a week off the market.

So here we go again. Everything is being put back on the market today. We had a nice break of a couple of days without worry of keeping the house in show home condition (though it’s become a habit so it stayed that way anyway) and not needing to worry we may have to run out of the house in a minutes notice. It was so nice!! It will be even nicer once the house sells though, so I’m ready to start it again and will keep all my fingers and toes crossed that we will still get the traffic and the interest, but have someone working for us that believes in what we have and will work to get us the best return possible on our investment.

One would think that a journey of travel begins once you have reached your travel destination. I’m here to say that is absolutely false. While planning my first Camino I discovered that the journey actually began when I decided to go, then started researching all the plans and travel to get to the Camino de Santiago. There was so much that needed to go into it! Deciding where to start walking, deciding what city to fly into, figuring out which plane, train or bus to catch to get to the starting city, finding where I was going to stay and what places along the way took reservations and which didn’t. I could go on and on! It felt like there was so much to figure out and do!

Life is crazy!

Deciding to switch from homeschooling to worldschooling has been the same. We talked about it a lot, just here and there, as an idea we tossed around for many years. It seemed more like a dream rather than something that could become a reality. When we finally decided to make it a reality it was time to start working on our house, updating it and getting it ready to sell. That was a journey within it’s self! We started to do updates to the house, but our schedules were so busy that it was a couple of years before we actually had time to seriously start working on it. I hired out the hardest work so that it would get finished as quickly as possible, but did the rest myself. Lets just say I have done enough house painting to last me the rest of my life! As it got close to being ready I brought in the realtor. This actually made the deadline I had given us a hard reality. It also brought more stress to the table! There were contractors, paint, repair, daily visits to the hardware store, dealing with teens, dealing with a toddler, the husbands busy schedule that didn’t allow him to help, softball practice, softball games, what’s for lunch?, what’s for dinner?, selling off some stuff, but not too much, storing other things, stagers, photographers and so much more! Working my butt off every single day, I ended up still needing to push the deadline back, but finally it was finished and was ready to go on the market! It felt like the victorious end of something great! In reality, it was just the beginning of the next leg of the journey.

So many emotions

This is the first experience we’ve ever had with selling a house. We bought our home 15 years ago and that’s where we have lived ever since. I felt as though it was just a house and selling it would be the beginning to the next chapter of our lives. That is until we received the first offer. It came only a week after we had the house on the market. I was amazed at how fast it was! They came in at full asking price and weren’t asking anything more than what I was willing to give them. It seemed perfect! We all signed the contract that day! I was so excited! Until my excitement turned to something else, not sure what to call it, maybe fear. Realizing we would be leaving the only home my children have ever known and it would be in 30 days! Would they love the house as we have? There have been so many happy memories here. Would the home enjoy even more great memories? They included a letter with their offer that told us how this was the house of their dreams. They had laid under the stars and talked about all they wanted in a home and THIS was it. They looked forward to raising their little family here and all the wonderful things they would do with it. For me, this was perfect! The letter brought me to tears. I sat with my husband, after a long day of softball, tearing up and talking about how perfect this all was and how it seemed meant to be. At least until 10:00 pm that night when I received the call that the deal was “going sour”. It was their perfect home until they researched the internet options and didn’t like them…..seriously.

Learn some patience

It’s been another week now and I’ve decided I won’t be reading any letters that come with the offers. We have had an inquiry from someone who wanted to do some “upgrades” and wanted to know if we are “motivated sellers”. Since the house has only been on the market for 13 days and priced really well for our area, I can’t say I’m motivated enough to pay for their upgrades. It was probably the best choice for them not to put an offer in. So this journey continues. The one of emotions on a rollercoaster. I get anxious every day for the house to get sold, then remind myself that it will and I just need to be patient. Rather than the planning or the repairs it’s now, when will it get sold, how much will it sell for, is it priced right, will we need to drop the price, getting out of the house on a moments notice so it can be viewed, cleaning it daily and on and on.

The good stuff

If anything is learned from all this, it’s that every experience in your life is a journey. Enjoy the great things about it and learn from the not so great things. I’m just waiting to get to the good stuff now. The planning of the travel and the getting there!